Sunday, December 30, 2012

What I’m reading #91

Just back from five days on a high-country
sheep station (Lake Heron, a lovely place and totally
recommended to anyone looking for a terrifying 4WD drive across river beds),
just a range away from the setting of Mona Anderson’s A River Rules My Life. Yes, that is us
above.

A Financial
Timesprofile of German chancellor Angela Merkel. Quote unquote:

She went into politics, she says, because
she was convinced that eastern Germany needed more people in parliament who had
never been politically active.

Toby Manhire in the Listenerouts
Alan Bollard, former governor of the Reserve Bank, as a novelist. The Rough Mechanical: the man who could
is available
as a download from Amazon. Stephen Franks likes it. So do I, having
read it in manuscript a few years ago: when I met Alan subsequently I badgered
him to publish it, so I hope I may claim a small degree of credit for its
e-appearance. The protagonist is closely based on the New Zealand-born
economist Bill Phillips, deviser of the Phillips curve
which traces the relationship between inflation and unemployment. Some say that
if Phillips had lived (he died at 60 in 1975) he might have won the Nobel for
economics. Be that as it may, it’s quite a feat to make economics interesting,
and even more so to make engrossing fiction out of it.

Lunch
with Les Murray. He likes Greek food, not so much the wine. And his new book is
a must-buy. I spent a couple of hours with him a few years ago as his minder.
Best job I ever had. (h/t Bill Manhire)

An official earthquake memorial, as
outlined in the blueprint, is still years away, but local artist Pete Majendie
took the initiative and presented a more spontaneous and low-budget one. He
collected 185 chairs, one for each of the dead, painted them white, and put
them in rows on the grounds of the Oxford Tce Baptist Church.

You could read it either of two ways.
Either the chairs had been recently vacated by the 185 people who lost their
lives last year or the empty chairs waited for the people to return, perhaps in
a kind of general resurrection of the dead. Or, as Majendie said, you could
simply sit in one of the chairs and contemplate.

The poor will always be with us. Let them see
trees. From the same source, why recycling paper doesn’t
work.

The soul/gospel singer Fontella
Bass died on Boxing Day. She is best known for “Rescue Me”, a 1965 hit
which she co-wrote and fought for decades to be paid for. Here she is with Lyle
Lovett – yes, Lyle Lovett, because country and soul are a natural fit –
performing a sparkling version of “Don’t Mess Up a Good Thing”:

A wonderful
piece about wood carving. David Esterly
was engaged to recreate a work by Grinling Gibbons destroyed in the 1986 fire
at Hampton Court, and wrote a book
about the process. When in London I always visit St James Picadilly which has
some of his finest work: see here for photos.
It is astonishing. (h/t Grahame Sydney)

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London
School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused
in 1922 on whether when English children were “dying from lack of milk”, one
should extend “the charitable impulse” to Russian and Chinese children who, if
saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was “the
larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants” and
“obviously” one wouldn’t “spend one’s available income” on “a Central African
negro”.

A brilliant crime novel, Gun Machine by Warren Ellis, published on 1 January
2013 by Mulholland (in New
Zealand, it’s Hachette). Fantastic premise: minutes after his partner is killed
beside him a New York cop finds an apartment full of guns, nothing but guns,
arranged on the walls and floor in rows and spirals. Turns out that each one is
connected to an unsolved murder – and then it gets really weird, in a First Nation way. Fast, funny and inventive, with
great characters. I hope it’s the start of a series.